"As long as I get my huge, cripplingly heavy book to put on my shelf and gloat over, then I'll be happy."

Big Al talks to the New Statesman's Helen Lewis Hasteley about Jerusalem, not having a television, and the end of the universe as we know it. (Hey - it's Alan Moore. You were expecting maybe football scores?)

New Statesman interview with Alan Moore

A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Bohemian

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I've been looking for a pre-beard photograph of Mr. Moore for a very long time. Many thanks to otium longum for posting.

[It's funny - I thought that without the facial hair he'd be unrecognizable, but there's no mistaking the demonic intensity of that gaze.]

No WATCHMEN Prequels Or Sequels With Moore's Involvement

Hi. Yes, I'm still alive. How are you?

From zikkir.net:

Alan Moore: 'I Don't Want Watchmen Back'

I'll try to remember to post a link to the Wired interview when it comes out.

(Semi-)Off-Topic: Excellent Steve Ditko Documentary (w/Alan Moore Interview) On YouTube

Thought I'd share a great BBC documentary on eccentric comics genius Steve Ditko that I discovered on YouTube recently.



The Alan Moore interview alone makes it worth the price of admission, particularly his inspired ode to Ditko's Randian superhero Mr. A via a reworked version of the Velvet Underground's
"Sister Ray" (which, incidentally, has had said song stuck on "repeat" in my head for the last week or so).

Off-Topic: "The Architects Of Fear" At Hulu.Com ***Possible Spoilers***

Check out this old episode of The Outer Limits and tell me if it doesn't remind you of the ending of a certain critically acclaimed superhero graphic novel. (Note: If you haven't read Watchmen, you may not want to watch this - it may spoil the ending for you.)




Interesting, eh? (I had actually never seen that episode before today, and particularly enjoyed the beautifully noirish cinematography of Conrad Hall.) Apparently, Alan Moore only noticed the resemblance after he had already came up with the ending. There's a reference to the episode in the last chapter of Watchmen in what Moore referred to as "a belated nod".

Off-Topic: William S. Burroughs Documentary On Google Video

Found an interesting documentary on literary icon/Alan Moore hero William S. Burroughs on Google Video; I thought I would post it in case anyone wanted to have a look.



There's some charming footage of him goofing around with Allen Ginsberg and other friends, which is nice to see - Burroughs seemed to have such a grim affect all the time. Perhaps that was just sort of his default public persona. Then again, Burroughs probably had more to be grim about than most of us.

***

Multi-screen viewing is seemingly anticipated by Burroughs' cut-up technique. He suggested re-arranging words and images to evade rational analysis, allowing subliminal hints of the future to leak through... an impending world of exotica, glimpsed only peripherally.

Adrian Veidt (Ozymandias)
"Look On My Works, Ye Mighty..."
Watchmen

PS The music you hear at the very beginning of the film is from "Another Green World" by Brian Eno.

Vice Magazine Interview With Alan Moore

James Knight was kind enough to post a longer version of his interview with Alan Moore for Vice Magazine over at his Name Me Someone Who's Not A Parasite blog (good name, that), in which The Bearded One discusses Jerusalem, its connection to Voice Of The Fire, and other esoterica (Einstein a theosophist? Getthafuckouttahere). Anyway - worth checking out.

Conclusion

Well, that's about it for Deciphering Hob's Hog, believe it or not. I plan on keeping it up on the net (for as long as Blogger lets me, anyway) for those who are reading/writing about Voice Of the Fire, and on putting up occasional posts regarding any news I get regarding VOTF, Alan Moore's "sequel" prose novel Jerusalem (still a work in progress the last that I've heard), and any other Moore-related items I find interesting enough to post. But as the stated mission of Deciphering Hob's Hog is, well, deciphering "Hob's Hog", and said mission is completed, you can consider this blog to be, at present, in semi-retirement. I'll continue to post my reviews at Amazon, and may start another blog in the future (probably through Blogger again, because they're so easy to use), but for now I'm taking at least a week off from doing anything net-related that's more complicated than checking my e-mail. Many thanks to those of you who came along for the ride, especially those who commented. I learned a lot and had a lot of fun - I hope you did, too.

Off-Topic: Thoughts On Arthur Machen's "The White People"

The following is just a touch-up of some brief notes I made a couple of weeks ago after reading the Arthur Machen short story "The White People" (in case you don't pick up on it from what I wrote - I really, really liked it) (and yes, I'll stop going on about Ulysses (for a while) after this).

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Alice's Adventures In Wonderland meets Ulysses in Hell. Probably the most brilliant piece of horror fiction I've ever read - the only thing I can think of that comes close in Poe's "Cask of Amontillado", and this might be even more ingenious than that. I mean, come on - this anticipates the writing style of James Joyce by 15 years (it was written in 1899) and Lovecraft's by nearly a quarter-century. Why isn't this guy better known today? To be placed in the sui generis file alongside Clark Ashton Smith, I guess (i.e., too fuckin' weird for almost anyone to understand, not to mention appreciate).

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PS It appears that Alan Moore is a Machen fan, too - check out this and this.

Addendum: I did a little editing of (and added some hyperlinks to) the second paragraph, just for fun.

Monkeyin' Around With Google Books

I gotta see if this works. This is the Google Books preview of Alan Moore: Comics As Performance, Fiction As Scalpel By Annalisa Di Liddo. I found it while I was doing a bit of research on Mr. Moore's literary influences (the inspiration for this month's poll, in case you haven't guessed).



Sweet. I never realized you can embed entire books from Google Books in your blog. I'll have to be careful - I'll have the entire bloody Library of Congress here if I don't look out. :)

(Semi-)Off-Topic: "Mr. Wilson, How Are You Tonight?"

Found this on YouTube yesterday - it's Moore's tribute to the writer Robert Anton Wilson, who passed away a couple of years ago. It's brilliant - check it out.

The Man Himself On Hob's Hog

I'm just a postin' fool today.

Found a wonderful interview with Mr. Moore at blather.net today that I had read a few years back and then forgot where I saw it. The whole thing is great, but I especially wanted to post a brief excerpt where they talk about Voice Of The Fire; I'm sure readers of this blog in particular will appreciate the humor of it.

Interviewer: I haven't read [the prose book] Voice of the Fire

Alan Moore: - - Very few people have - -

I: Although Mark Pilkington from Fortean Times, he says it's fantastic, so I'd like to pick it up.

AM: Well, if you should find a copy somewhere, then good luck getting through the first chapter. The first chapter, I actually tried my best to write it in an approximation of what I thought Neolithic thought-patterns might be like. So I've done it all in this completely boiled-down English, where I think there's a vocabulary of about four hundred words in the first story, I mean it's sixty pages long, it's very long and very dense but I think I only use about four hundred words and when you think that the average vocabulary of the average Sun reader is about ten thousand words, it's... it was an experiment.

I: Sounds kind of exciting, though.

AM: Well, it's almost unreadable. [Laughs]. I loved it but people have pointed out to me since that if I was going to be doing my first novel and the first chapter of my first novel, then perhaps it might not have been a bad idea to do it in English but ah, what the hell.